Fairly useless, yes, but people liked it for a while. The company deserves the credit for making a first widely used push-based program. Not that there are many cool push applications in existence anyway...

PointCast was acquired by Idealab in May 1999, and everyone who follows the developments of E-commerce knows what that means. Yes, PointCast closed down in February 2000, and the service got integrated into EntryPoint, a program with similiar idea but inferior user interface...